Impulsive force during collision between solid and liquid

[draaz1]

Homework Statement

I am trying to model an impact between a solid and a liquid as a 1D elastic collision where KE and momentum are conserved. Calculating the impulse is no problem. My problem in when I try to come up with an accurate collision time in order to calculate impulsive forces. Does anyone know of a reasonably accurate approach to find these forces.

Homework Equations

Conservation of KE, Conservation of Momentum, Herztian correlations for impacting solids, elastic coefficients of impacted materials.

The Attempt at a Solution

Use Hertzian correlations between two elastic solids to get an idea of the impact time (around .003s) for my initial conditions.

 

[turin]

Why do you think that it is reasonable to model a solid-liquid collision as elastic? Usually, such a collision is quite inelastic, since the configuration of the liquid doesn't even restore until many collision timescales later (e.g. the ripples in the surface of a pool will continue for several seconds or minutes, even though the tennis ball only makes contact with the surface of the water for less than a second).

The only idea that I have to theoretically determine the collision force is to consider bouyancy. However, I would expect that surface effects are also significant (e.g. surface tension), but I don't know how to deal with that.

 

[draaz1]

I modeled the collision as elastic to be conservative because it would cause the maximum transfer of energy.